Modern multi-agent knowledge systems increasingly accumulate knowledge through chains of autonomous transformations rather than direct retrieval. Existing provenance work records what happened - execution traces, tool calls, evidence links - and source-reliability estimation is long established (truth discovery, reputation systems). What is missing is an operational framework that attaches graded, per-domain transmitter reliability to claim-level transmission chains, with completeness semantics, transformation-typed aggregation, decoupled content criticism, and serve/review/quarantine routing. Classical Islamic hadith science confronted a structurally similar problem: deciding whether knowledge transmitted through chains of human narrators should be accepted. Over centuries it developed a rigorous methodology - isnad (a complete transmission chain attached to every claim), rijal (systematic grading of each narrator's integrity and precision), weakest-link chain evaluation, corroboration through independent chains, and matn criticism (content evaluated independently of chain quality). This paper transfers that methodology to AI system design. We contribute a formal mapping from hadith-science concepts to multi-agent pipelines, a relational schema implementing claim chains and a graded narrator registry, a decision matrix combining chain grade with content criticism, and an evaluation on 20,000 claims from real physics textbooks. The evaluation validates weakest-link quarantine and independent-chain corroboration; reports a partial failure of the grade-recovery loop, which missed the highest-fault narrator; and reports two analyses as inconclusive, including a matched-coverage comparison the framework could not reach with the reference content critic. The paper is explicit throughout about which claims the evidence does and does not yet support.
AI knowledge systems require representations of entity importance for retrieval, recommendation, evidence selection, and knowledge-intensive reasoning. Yet importance is often reduced to a single score derived from either human response or graph structure. Such compression may discard distinctions that matter when an AI system must choose among entities for different tasks. This study introduces an interpretable dual-signal representation in which each entity is characterized by an audience-evaluation dimension and a structural-authority dimension. The framework is evaluated using movie entities as an empirical validation domain. IMDb non-commercial datasets provide a rating-based audience ranking, Wikidata supports entity alignment, and English Wikipedia hyperlinks form the knowledge network on which PageRank estimates structural authority. Experiments on 482 entities and 13,690 directed relationships reveal a statistically significant but weak association between the two dimensions (Spearman rho = 0.2275, p < 0.001). Their overlap is only 10% in the top 10 and 34% in the top 100, while entity-level divergence occurs in both directions. The results show that audience evaluation and structural authority are non-redundant signals and should not automatically be collapsed into a single scalar notion of importance. The contribution is not a new ranking algorithm or learned embedding, but a minimal knowledge-representation framework and an empirical test of its dimensional necessity. The findings support task-aware AI knowledge systems that preserve distinct importance signals before applying context-specific selection or aggregation.